So You Live in a Declining Western Democracy

An overview of things as they are.

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I’m sorry.

For you, but also for me. And for everyone I care about. And people I don’t know. People who live here, in the United States, down the road, across the country, and people around the world I’ll never meet.

I was born in 1981, early enough that I was still raised with an expectation. Maybe you were as well. I was born into a dirt-poor family that had been beat down over the generations. Used up and spit out. They lived hard and died early. They worked in factories and coal mines and limestone quarries and restaurants, sometimes taking on multiple jobs. By the time they reached their forties they were worn out, their bodies already failing. If they didn’t have sudden heart attacks mowing the yard, they struggled with debilitating health in their 50’s and 60’s.

And yet, there was a story that got told. It was tinged with hard realities, for sure. My grandparents barely survived the Depression and World War II. Their kids lived tough lives and carried themselves with Midwestern pessimism. But still, the larger narrative was that America was the most powerful country in the history of the world and there was an opportunity to live better lives. If you earned it, of course.

Watching them struggle, I had my doubts. But my first inkling of the harsh reality came in the first decade of the 2000’s, when I watched this country rush into an illegal war that spanned the globe, when the survivors of Hurricane Katrina were left to fend for themselves, and when the economy bottomed-out in 2008. It felt a lot like when one of our cars were die. One day it worked, the next it sputtered and gave out. Dead. Undependable. Spent.

When that happened there was panic. Lack of money and resources created a crisis. If you couldn’t get to work you were going to lose your job. Your situation would get worse and then there wouldn’t be food or shelter or medication. You hoped that maybe these things would appear. That the church you belonged to might help. A neighbor, even. A program you’d heard about. And, when they didn’t appear, the crisis worsened.

We all feel it now. Regardless of political affiliation, the one thing we can all agree on is that something has gone wrong and given out. The Right believes the answer is to embrace reactionary energies, weaponize the state, and use oppressive ideologies to control society to their liking. The Center continues to believe the status quo is stable and salvageable while blaming “aberrations” like Donald Trump, espousing empathy and concern while allying itself with the Center when it comes to legislation and protection of capital. What remains of the Left, after decades of assassinations, institutional undermining, and intentional atomization, expresses a need for addressing the material conditions and hastening inequality.

Underneath it all, we know things are not working as expected. Like a broken-down care, we may not understand what components have failed or what work needs carried out to alleviate the problem, we just know it isn’t functioning.

What Happens When the Engine Gives Out

I have spent a lot of time explaining what has gone wrong. I’ll spare the complete explanation, but there are always new readers so I’ll give a quick summary: starting in the 1970’s and 1980’s the New Deal consensus was interrupted by the wealthiest individuals to create a new system in which trillions of dollars were funneled from the working and middle classes into their pocketbooks, creating massive corruption that has overtaken our system and led to this moment in which neoliberal capitalism requires an authoritarian turn in order to keep order and progress the plan to further empower the wealthy while undermining democracy. As this happens, America and other Western democracies are taken over piece by piece.

What I want to discuss is how this manifests.

Politically, this is the driver of what Dispatches From A Collapsing State often analyzes. The Right, as always, is continually looking for attempts to unseat liberal democracy (including representative government and the notion of equality in the eyes of the law and society).

For those interested, I explore this extensively in The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis. For perspective on the emergence of liberal democracy as a replacement of theocratic authoritarianism, and an idea of what the Right wants to restore in this moment, you can find Episode 1 of The Midnight Kingdom Lecture Series below.

As faith in institutions predictably and rightfully declines, the Right takes advantage and uses conspiracy theories and fear-based, controlling ideologies (religion, patriarchal notions, poisonous nationalism, racism, homophobia, etc.) to create faux-populist movements obsessed with overthrowing those institutions and replacing them with authoritarian structures. This creates a strange and dizzying environment where violence is a constant threat, discourse declines and is replaced by wild-eyed fearmongering, reality is discarded in favor of contradictory and bewildering ideas, and the crisis escalates continually.

Socially, this affects everything. Shared confusion mutates into growing radicalization and, conversely, deepening apathy. It is a continual abuse meant to dissuade the masses from participating in politics and organizing a counter to the reactionary charge. Meanwhile, attacks on education and science worsen the situation. It begins with public education that, for generations, refuses to wrestle with the actual history of the country or in-depth knowledge of politics or economics, which seeds the ground for the type of revisionist attacks we’re seeing now against “wokeness.” If left unchecked it will result in a “patriotic,” nationalist paradigm that hides the true nature of power, cleaving the population from any actual understanding of what has happened, what is happening, and what could happen. Wealth class attacks on science, carried out in order to destroy any impediments of profit, create a whirlpool of misunderstanding that escalates threats like climate change and contributes to an overall malaise that anything can be actually known and adding to the growing need to check out and simply look after yourself.

On a cultural level, you have probably felt the corrosion of corporate dominance. Since our leaders lifted oversight and allowed a speed-run of mergers and monopolization, we’ve been left with a landscape of retread reboots, mindless entertainments, and a lack of innovative material that challenges people and demands introspection and stresses change/progress. Neoliberalism emphasizes personal gratification and the capitali-ization of the individual, leading to a world in which we want what we want when we want it without consideration of who is on the other side of the transaction. This means we do not consider the workers being exploited around the world or the environmental damage required to fuel this system. This means we have come to identify with the corporation and choose to “enjoy” culture and our interests as avenues for making money rather than nourishing or bettering us.

All of these things happen simultaneously and feed one another. The maelstrom of activity adds to the overall disorientation. You see constant attacks on what remains of education. Science is continually distorted, scientists and experts attacked and intimidated. Culture becomes the only remaining battlefield. Movies, TV shows, music, celebrities, and even the appearance of representation in anything is focused on, creating a one-two punch as reactionaries lash together “deviant culture” and the need for authoritarian reactions, all while facilitating the construction of an “alternative capitalism” populated with “anti-woke” products and grifting opportunities.

Things get dumber and dumber because liberal democracy’s traditional levers - namely representative government - are coopted and neutralized, necessitating vapid and surface-level disagreements on products and trends.

The Ice Shelf and the Collapse

In the beginnings of decline it sometimes feels slow-moving. Strange signals appear in discourse. Calls for “freedom fries” instead of french fries during the Iraq War. Tea Partiers getting dressed up and making outrageous claims. James Inhofe brandishing a snowball on the Senate floor to “disprove” climate change.

Over time, however, it becomes everything. The Republican Party rides the tide of absurdism and extremism until it becomes the party of QAnon and reactionary nonsense. For supporters, it grows until it overtakes their entire identity and they find themselves enmeshed in an authoritarian cult presided over by a D-list reality TV star conman who lost more money than any American over the course of a decade. This, it should be noted, is the ideal environment for the wealth class to advance their planned destruction of liberal democracy into its next phase: total control of the system and the final defeat of democracy itself.

It would not be possible if the Center was not complicit. Guarding the status quo is a conservative position, meaning we are now experiencing a duopoly split between the Center/Center Right and the Far Right. And, as things worsen and the Right presses the issue, the Center picks up speed as it grows more conservative and reactionary, gliding on declining culture and information as it capitulates with Right Wing demands. This is the case in the United States, but also in other Western Democracies, which have been co-opted in the same manner and now stand on the precipice of a domino-like fall.

The Center - consisting of moderate white liberals, refugee Republicans, and supposed “leftist” media outlets and platforms - is derided as it yields and cooperates, all the while supporters who lack information, which has become specialized knowledge, are left wondering what in the hell is happening. “The Resistance” becomes a marketing opportunity resting on the promise of opposition. It mirrors what has happened for centuries, only now it has added components of new technology that outstrips even our own cognitive understanding.

Oh. And the people controlling that technology grow more and more reactionary and Right Wing as they accumulate more and more wealth and see democracy as their natural enemy.

Where We Are

This is a brief summary of the complicated and bizarre factors that bring us to this moment. We are inundated with Right Wing abuses, the wealth class’s aggressive attacks, increasing capitulation, and cultural and intellectual decay. It means things get stranger and stranger. It feels inscrutable because much of this information has been kept from you.

The antidote lies in working counter to these things. Momentum builds in the opposite direction, so you must push against it. Becoming mired in spectacle and absurdity-based discourse does nothing but add to the problem. Accepting the appearance of answers by guardians of the status quo and hangers-ons producing podcasts and content promising institutional responses only worsens the delusion. Collapsing under the abuse and believing you are alone or powerless is the main objective and has to be resisted.

It feels very, very large. After all, we’re talking not just about nation states but also the whole of so-called “Western Civilization,” a project that was always, always, always leading to this. You are but one person. But doing your part by continuing to sort through the debris and find actual information and nourishing and healing yourself is, in fact, a revolutionary act. I continually advocate getting involved in small-d democratic action, but that is literally impossible if you do not first familiarize yourself with the actual conditions and reject this madness outright. Doing so creates the energy necessary to fight back.